ABSTRACT
Born into an influential family of ministeriales of Bremen, around the year 1165, Albert of Buxhovden was not the initiator of the Christianisation and conquest of Livonia but was elected in 1199 to continue the missionary project of the Archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, launched in the early 1180s by the Augustinian monk Meinhard of Segeberg. Historians have always recognised Albert’s major contribution to the institutional organisation of the colony of Livonia. Albert’s active lobby both in the papal Curia and in royal or imperial courts was far from usual or self-evident in its day. The founding of the Livonian mission on Albert’s personal mobility and network constituted its strength as well as its weakness.
